is answered with the clinking below.  The drawers are the civilest people in it, men of good bringing up, and howsoever we esteem of them, none can boast more justly of their high calling.  ’Tis the best theatre of natures, where they are truly acted, not played, and the business as in the rest of the world up and down, to wit, from the bottom of the cellar to the great chamber.  A melancholy man would find here matter to work upon, to see heads as brittle as glasses, and often broken; men come hither to quarrel, and come hither to be made friends:  and if Plutarch will lend me his simile, it is even Telephus’s sword that makes wounds and cures them.  It is the common consumption of the afternoon, and the murderer or maker-away of a rainy day.  It is the torrid zone that scorches the[25] face, and tobacco the gun-powder that blows it up.  Much harm would be done, if the charitable vintner had not water ready for these flames.  A house of sin you may call it, but not a house of darkness, for the candles are never out; and it is like those countries far in the North, where it is as clear at mid-night as at mid-day.  After a long sitting, it becomes like a street in a dashing shower, where the spouts are flushing above, and the conduits running below, while the Jordans like swelling rivers overflow their banks.  To give you the total reckoning of it; it is the busy man’s recreation, the idle man’s business, the melancholy man’s sanctuary, the stranger’s welcome, the inns-of-court man’s entertainment, the scholar’s kindness, and the citizen’s courtesy.  It is the study of sparkling wits, and a cup of canary[26] their book, whence we leave them.

A SHARK

Is one whom all other means have failed, and he now lives of himself.  He is some needy cashiered fellow, whom the world hath oft flung off, yet still clasps again, and is like one a drowning, fastens upon any thing that is next at hand.  Amongst other of his shipwrecks he has happily lost shame, and this want supplies him.  No man puts his brain to more use than he, for his life is a daily invention, and each meal a new stratagem.  He has an excellent memory for his acquaintance, though there passed but how do you betwixt them seven years ago, it shall suffice for an embrace, and that for money.  He offers you a pottle of sack out of joy to see you, and in requital of his courtesy you can do no less than pay for it.  He is fumbling with his purse-strings, as a school-boy with his points, when he is going to be whipped, ’till the master, weary with long stay, forgives him.  When the reckoning is paid, he says, It must not be so, yet is straight pacified, and cries, What remedy?  His borrowings are like subsidies, each man a shilling or two, as he can well dispend; which they lend him, not with a hope to be repaid, but that he will come no more.  He holds a strange tyranny over men, for he is their debtor, and they fear him as a creditor.  He is